Went over to friend Jeff's house at lunch to play the new Wii Mario Kart. I even brought my own plate and rubber bands to make myself a makeshift wheel. The makeshift wheel worked pretty well. But using the wheel gets tiring, so after the first game, I switched to the classic controller.

Overall I'm afraid i have to say that I liked the downloadable N64 version better. The battle mode has really been changed for the Wii release. No longer can you just play as 4 friends. You now all have to play with 8 additional Robot AI karts. Wherein the N64 version you get to chase down your friends-- in this version human players are outnumbered 2-to-1 by the AI players, so you almost never get to attack your friends carts directly.

Also it's not a free-for-all, they force you to be on two teams, since there are 4 AI players on each team, it's actually possible for the human players to get 0s and yet if the AI's do well their team can still win. At times it felt like, why bother playing at all? Just leave it up to the AIs.

Same with the race, with 8 additional AI's most of the game, the human players don't even always break the top 5.

As to the graphics, some maps are nice, but others are dizzing as the extra blurred/shaded backgrounds can get abit much at times.

Overall, I like the N64 version way better, and it seems weird that Nintendo removed all that original player vs. player game play.

Update 4/29/08: 4:52pm: Jeff was reading more online about the game, and it looks like you may be able to turn off all those extra AI drivers. That would certainly make sense, and it seemed very odd to me when he said you couldn't, but normally Jeff knows these things and I don't question his expertise in these matters. It would certainly help things to get rid of all those extra AI players. But I still want Free-for-all Battle play instead of Team Battle only and I think I still like the simplicity of the graphics on the N64 version. But there you go. More details as things develop ;)

Update 5/1/08: 7:06am: Friend Jeff read the manual. You can turn off the Robot AI's afterall. Played it again last night. It makes a big big difference in the game. They do not have free-for-all battle though-- you have to play teams. I'm still a little torn between the two versions-- once you play Wii Mario Kart and then go back to the N64 version, the N64 version does feels very sluggish, and then of course there are dozens upon dozens of maps on the Wii version, many of which are cool-- if often very big. Also the single player version of the game looks very impressive. So I suppose, for Casual Kart fans, download the N64 version. If you want to invest some serious time into single cart or online cart play, go for the new Wii Mario Kart.

I want to hear your

Evaporating Twitters

I mentioned this weekend, I like that the Twitters slowly drop off the
blog scroll. Normally the last 15 to 20 are in my Twitter RSS feed and
pop-up on the blog.
Every so often, Twitter completely resets it's RSS feeds, to a clean
slate, and they drop off all at once. That's not as cool.

» Whole month seems a little lighter on the blogging side than normal I suppose. Chalk some of that up to the work I've been doing on Adam and Comfort's The Uniques website as well as talking in their forum. Twittering has been absorbing a little of my internet attention of late too. Since the Twitters are being integrated into my blog via RSS-- they drop off slowly as new RSS Twitters are put in place. At first I was going to add some programming to my blog to permanently copy over the tweets into my own database, but lately I've found some charm in letting my twitters drop off one by one. In a world of internet permanence I like that there is that part of the blog that is transient.

» I did not get to see Friday's Battlestar Galactica yet, as I'm waiting for A&C to get back from Pittsburgh Comicon and I'm going to watch it with them. They are down at Pittsburgh right now, they got to meet the Chief there. I'll let them tell the story on their blog when they get back-- it being their story and all :)

» Grey's Anatomy returned this past week. Not a show I blog about here too much, generally I talk that one over with a couple girls at work, this week I also twittered back and forth on the topic a little- so since I have a bunch of random bits typed up, my side of that twittering conversation is below, I'll keep it in a nice little textbox so as to not overpower the folk that come to this blog for comic, action figure and more traditional expressions of geekness:

...anyway, good that Grey's is back.

» Just noticed that my # links at the top of my posts by the date/header haven't been working on the "current blog" page since I re-coded the site to integrate the twitter and flickr posts automatically into the scroll. doh! It's all fixed now.

» In other tech news, I think I'm going to drop my Vonage Home phone at the end of the month. I never use it and pretty much never have in the 2 to 3 years I've had it. I'm going to switch over all those businesses and such that you have to give a phone number, to my Grand Central number. So if for some reason the number with "04" on the end is the only number you have of mine. Email me and I'll send you the Grand Central one, or just keep using the cell like everyone else.

One of the reasons I kept the Vonage for so long, is that I wanted a back-up phone in case I ever lost the cell. But with Skype now installed on my EeePC, and disposable cell phones so easy to get in a jiffy (like at Meijer open 24 hours even)-- should I lose my cellphone, it shouldn't be too hard to go that route. I'll save $20 a month, which ain't alot, but why keep spending the $20?

» I had been getting most of my Web2.0 site info from eHub but I just added Techcrunch to my RSS feed. I've seen articles linked from Digg and such before, but I never stopped to look at their focus before. Nice site.

» Someone give me an invite to Brightkite this morning. Brightkite is a SMS cellphone centric social service similiar to Twitter. However, whereby Twitter is mostly focussed on: "What are you doing?" Brightkite is focused on "Where are you at?"

You "check-in" with Brightkite telling it where you are from your cellphone, and it will tell your Brightkite friends or even complete strangers that are also nearby "where you are". As far I can tell, you have to check in manually. I don't see any built-in tracking thing. I'd actually find built-in tracking sortof interesting. It's inherently a creepy idea, but I think it would be novel to see my daily path traced out on a google map someday. Brightkite doesn't do anything that interesting yet. But the potential is there.

The other downside to Brightkite is that it would seem at first glance to be more useful if you are on a college campus or in another environment with alot of close together people who have the abillity to organize very spontaneously. Most of the people I know are not very spontaneous, they're generally people with their whole week planned out-- so I'm not sure their noticing I'm sitting in a coffee shop, at the mall, or at a restaurant down the street, is going to lend itself to them altering their already tightly planned out days.

There's still the other angle of the service that you could meet total strangers. Here's how that's supposed to work-- near as I can figure:
1. Another random Brightkite user near you updates their location.
2. You, being nearby, get a notification of that Brightkite person's nearness.
3. You look up that person and see their picture/profile on Brightkite.
4. They seem interesting, you find them nearby and start-up a conversation with them.

I think the above could work, but having to manually update your location is sortof the weak link in that scenario. If it was automatically tracking and updating your location and matching you up with people in realspace, then yeah that could catch on.

That's coming soon I think. Someone is going to work that out and partner with a cellphone service to make that happen. It's the sortof thing that seems possibile to be a killer app for Google's Android platform.

Anyway, Brightkite seems interesting and I might play with it for awhile.

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

A friend of mine sent me a link to WoodTV about a robbery/shooting at Apparitions last night. I found the above video on Fox17, but didn't see a good way to link to it.

The article, says that an employee got shot, but didn't have any more details. What kind of person robs an independent comic book store? That's incredibly F-cked up. If anyone has more details, leave a message or link in the comments.

I saw this on a Twitter friends' blog. It's from Gaping Void which is an interesting web comic, that in alot of ways pre-dates what we would think of as webcomics. I used to follow this site years ago. Not really sure why I dropped off... It was something I followed pre-rss, when you could actually forget to follow a site.

Green Lantern Box Set - Will get because I'm a sucker for GL stuff. It's nice to finally get an Abin Sur. Doesn't hurt to have a second Tomar, Not sure where they are going with the destroyed Manhunter. I have three of those but I suppose a destroyed one will make an interesting addition. Not sure about the shorts on this GL. They look a little odd to me.

Justice League International. I think I'll lose count of how many Black Canary's I'll have after this one. Ice! Hooray, Whut up with the Disco Cape Batman- pass, Gnort! Gnort! Gnort! Now you know this is going to be my favorite figure of 2008.

$55 Jade Bust - Tempting I do like to get all sorts of Green Lantern stuff, but I'm not sure about this one yet.

Everything is so plentiful, in America anyway, the primary thing that is going to have value (beyond natural beauty) is attention. Rich or poor, everyone only has 24 hours in a day, and they have far less time than that, they can be attentive to consuming or producing; spending or generating income.

Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

Mike Manley, the lead artist for Brave and the Bold animated ain't no Bruce Timm, that's for sure-- from his blog:

One of the things I enjoy about this new Batman cartoon is the fact we are going back to a kinder, friendlier Batman. A Dick Sprang version, which is the guiding design principle we are working from and there still is a slight echo of the BT styling, which is a nice break from the grim and gritty. Let's face it, these cartoons are for children, young children 5-10,12 years old. Cereal eating, fruit rollup snacking, toy buying kids, not 30-something, 40-something bitter bee babymen who want these characters in adult situations. The message boards are already full of babymen angst about the show, how they hate the art, the idea of a kid friendly Batman and I have to just laugh at the rediculous comments. IMO one of the biggest resons comics suck ass and have since the 80's is the rise and overtaking of the biz by the Babyman fan and the loss of kids reading comics as a hobby. Now we are stuck with an aginging fanbase with limited taste, long memories, a twisted taste where the comic heroes have to be dark, gritty, sexy, adult...REAL! Humor, the most popular form of comic in the world is the least popular form of comic in the direct market. Fans don't realize what an aberation the direct market has become and how out of step it is with the rest of the comic reading world. I include it all, strips, manga, you name it, but superheroes are a niche with the smallest fanbase. The top books crack, what 100K? Try having a TV show with that number.

I loved the Batman comics as kid, I love the Batman TV show, the funny, corny Adam West, and millions did too. I think you can only darken these concepts to a degree and for a certain amount of time before you play them out, and face it, these concepts have really been played out anyway. 70 years of these characters pumped at you in every medium by the big corporations means there is little fresh that can be done.

Fans also forget the only reason any of this stuff exists is for $$$. The show exists to sell ads and toys and such, and for no other reason.

There's a badly written, by Bendis, Doom panel floating around the internets causing a stir based on it's uncharacteristic lowbrow style. Mike Sterling over at Progressive Ruin handily shows how a classic Doctor Doom berating featuring oft handed off the cuff language worthy of double and triple letter scores should be handled.

Now insolent imbecile click on the erstwhile link if you dare pray believe your ears capable of standing the onslaught of the mighty words of Doom!

Please reccomend some more AUDIO podcasts to me. My MP3 player is hungry for more content.

Note you can reccomend them, but I'm not currently listening to any Comic Book--Marvel/DC type podcasts, I'm so far behind on my weekly stack-- we're talking months here-- that I would just get way too spoiler alert overload to listen to any of those.

I babble on about blogging, the internet, Facebook and what not. Warning, I talk very even and at times somewhat monotone, it can be difficult to make out what I’m saying occasionally throughout. Seriously it’s 27 minutes long…

Just watched Thursday's Colbert Report. eh, not bad. The Doritos Peabody
Stickers could have been a little more slick. Cartoon was ok. Really bummed
that author Clay Shirky didn't get more time to speak though, I've been
loosely following him for close to a decade. He's one of the few that have
really had the "internet figured out" since the beginning and it would have
been cool if he had more of a chance to speak as opposed to being a joke
platform for Colbert to try to bounce off of (which really didn't work well
because in Internet terms, Shirky is a little too cool for the room for that
sort of thing.)
Ok episode overall, I do wonder if the Colbert Report is going to start to
drift off of hip if the Democrats take the White House this fall.

» Muxtape Very clean very simple way for people to share 12 MP3 files. Lots of music at the link, check it out before it gets sued into oblivion.

» Info on the Teen Titans Movie. If they were to find a way to tie this into the Justice League Movie, it could be pretty cool. But as it is more likely to stand, they may end up with alot of overlapping disconnected DC superhero movies.

People need to escape. Ben [Silverman, NBC's head of programming]'s programming strategy is to find some shows where people can tune in and then mentally tune out. That's his directive, and I think you'll see that reflected in the programs.

NBC, the network for people who want to "mentally tune out". Must drool TV.

A new drawing of Wolverine every day, for some reason that I haven't figured out yet.

Well I've figured it out, it's an attempt to draw attention from and capitalize on an existing fanbase that would otherwise probably not know who the artist is. Not that I have an issue with that, and they are very interesting and varied illustrations, so it's all good.

The first odd thing happened after the first issue came out. Now, remember, I’d been doing mostly original material for the previous few years, and doing fine. But I was suddenly flooded with email from kids — teenagers — who had never heard of me before. What was happening, it turned out, was that I was reaching seven or eight hundred stores at maximum, and there was anything up to a couple of thousand stores who just weren’t ordering my stuff. I remember talking this over with people at Marvel and particularly DC, and it turned out that this was in fact the case — that two thirds of comics stores really don’t order much other than superhero comics and a few licensed books. And in those years of doing my own thing, the audience had turned over to the point where there were people who’d never read a thing by me. It hadn’t been all that long ago that I’d been selling 200,000 copies of DV8 and 150,000 copies of WOLVERINE, I thought…

On the one hand, I get the FriendFeed concept. With everyone starting to have multiple services like Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube etc. etc., it makes sense to roll them all up into one Single Feed. On the other hand, you end up with 'one more service' to update and yet another venue to track comments down on, as FriendFeed will let users comment on posts within the FriendFeed service instead of directing comments back to my blog or Flickr or Youtube etc. The introduction of multiple comment streams is not a desirable feature of the FriendFeed concept to me. It's not a huge issue since there aren't alot of comments on my various services, but it still seems sloppy.

» Speaking of sloppy. You may notice that I've also changed this blog page in an attempt to make it less sloppy. I've completely integrated the Mobile Twitter and Flickr portion into the main roll. Basically I'm pulling the Twitter and Flickr RSS feeds and combining them with the Blog Entries pulled from my database, then I sort them by date and add the comment links onto each one.

It's actually some mildy scary looking code I've cobbled together but It appears to look like it's working for the time being. The only downside is the Twitter and Flickr portions might just occasionally just disappear. I'm going to solve this problem in the near future by importing the Flickr and Twitter feeds into my own database, but until then, the autoposted Flickr and Twitter feeds might be a little flakey. Oh and should I get crazy Digg/Slashdot levels of traffic to the newest blog page it could posibly flake too. I'm going to solve that by coding in some cacheing soon as well.

» I watched the Season 4 Opening Episode of Battlestar Galactica last night. Great Great Episode. Already can't wait for next week.

Batman the Brave and the Bold Animated. Hmm... not alot of info out there but this does not look very promising. Of course I'm generally biased against over-kidification of DC or Marvel characters in massmedia, so that's where I'm coming from.

On a related note. Last week I watched the first two episodes of Spectacular Spider-man Animated. It was pretty good. Certainly SS is skewed toward a younger audience but the large arc they seem to be building is interesting in the way they are tieing everything together is pretty cool.

Some minor Escort drama today. This morning I went out to my car and the battery was completely dead. Bummer. I had left the headlights on all night. No worries, I have one of those little portable jumpers, I hooked it up and in 3 minutes I was on the road.

Went and got comics at lunch... no problems. Was completely empty on gas though, so after work I filled up the gas tank. Full tank of gas and on the road-- about a half mile from the gas station the Escort engine stopped and it wouldn't start. I pulled it over to a side street in a nice little quiet suburban area, popped the hood, and did the guy staring at the engine routine.

Tried to start the car a couple more times, it *almost* acted like it wanted to start, but then nothing.

I thought maybe the battery was bad, it was a couple years old, we just ended winter, and I really ran it to nothing last night with 13 or 14 hours of being on.

Fortunately a friend of mine lives close by and was able to take me up to get a new battery. I also keep various wrenches etc in the trunk, so I was able to change the battery pretty easy. New battery in, I started up the car, but nothing. Still sounds like it almost wants to start but it won't commit to running.

Bummer.

I said thanks to my friend and then I called for the tow truck. Tow truck comes out and the tow-guy tried to start the car. Doesn't work for him either, so the tow guy starts to put the car onto the trailer. As he's doing it, the tow guy asks me "You didn't hit a pothole before the car stopped running did you?"

"Yeah, right before it stopped, I *did* hit a small pot hole. Do you think I might have knocked something loose?" I replied.

"Y'know, it my be your fuel injection shutoff switch." he said.

"Really?"

"Yeah, sometimes when you hit a pot hole the car can think you were in an accident and switch off the Fuel Injection."

"Really?!"

We went to the trunk and I popped off the little access cover-- I actually knew where that was because my Dad years ago had mentioned that if I was in an accident you should go back there and switch that off-- anyway I pushed a red button and then I was able to start the car right up!

Hooray... nothing wrong with the car! It was just the frakin' pothole triggering the emergency fuel injection switch off.

Sure I paid for a new battery-- but I probably needed that anyway. And the towtruck call cost $50, but it was a happy thing that I didn't have to have the car towed to or put into the dealership. And the Escort rolls on.

It's the little car that can!

Postscript to the above story. While I was waiting for the tow truck, the guy whose house I was sitting in front of came out to ask if I needed any help. I told him I had a tow truck coming out and I should be fine. Then he asked me what year my car was. I told him, and then he said his daughter had the same car a year older than mine. He said that hers was rusting out a little bit, but his daughter's car just keeps going and going.

That made me smile-- especially after it turned out to just be a fuel injection switchoff button I had to push.

Sat, 25 May 2013 07:57:39 -0700
I?m not a fan of the new Flickr redesign. It?s not even that I don?t like the visual look of it.My primary beef is: without warning they completely changed the service for paying customers. I?ve payed for a Pro account for years under the assumption that paying for a service would provide a little more reliability. Flickr has shown that not to be the case, so I?m planning to use it far less frequently and probably far differently than the personal photo site of record I have been using it as. (I?m also not pleased with their likely upcoming attention/advertising model)

I was able to put all my photos into one Set and download the full size images using a free service called flickandshare.com, so I have everything safely out of the service now. Likely I will eventually set up my own simple photo gallery (and give these photos a new home) on my website at chris-karath.com. Hosting your own services and codes seem to be the most reliable method for content that you want around for years to come.

Photos that are here now, will probably continue to be here, Yahoo willing, into the future.

Since Flickr has shown itself to be of unpredictable stability, and it appears to be transforming into more a social network than a photo service, I?ll probably plan on treating it as such. If you subscribe to my account for the action figures, I?ll probably from time to time still post a picture or two of those here with links back to my own site where I?ll likely start posting more photos.

If you follow for my personal photos, following me on Twitter or my personal blog atchris-karath.com will probably be your best bet. --- Best wishes, Chris.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:49:02 -0700
I've never actually taken the full tour of the Museum. It was free today, so we went through it. It's nicely done for it's sort of thing.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:49:02 -0700
Those light poles to the shore should be dry land

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:49:01 -0700
Stairways to nowhere. Grand Rapids.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:49:00 -0700

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:48:59 -0700

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:48:58 -0700
Grand Rapids Art Museum. This display is by a new guy who just joined our team at work.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 06:49:01 -0700

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:17:53 -0700
Both these guys have contributed a lot to comics. I'm not implying anything with the choice of pose. I figure in classic comic parlance though, these two comic heroes would be obligated to fight before teaming up to defeat some great evil.

Recent Blog Comments

Thread: p1825 Post by Jolloway2013-02-23 12:23:49 Hi Cris and other people who view this sight,
I just started a blog site jolloway.co.uk and I wonderd if anyone can give me any tips on blogging. I am curently using a site called word press to host me blog. I start around about a month ago and I\'m really struggling with it and if you do reply I\'m only 11 and found this sight by a photo in google Images.
-Josh
P.S. I love the background XP

Thread: p1706 Post by Chris2012-10-27 13:29:47 Fortunately, I resisted the DC/Master Bundles as they were pretty much only bundled with basic figures I already had. Had they been bundled with more unique DC figures, I might have alot more Masters figures at this point ;)

Thread: p1706 Post by De2012-10-27 13:06:27 I almost bit on Masters of the Universe when they were being bundled with DC Universe figures in the two-packs. I\'ve also liked the blending of sci-fi and fantasy but a lad only has so much room :-)

Thread: p1674 Post by T. Bass2012-10-24 20:55:50 Hi Chris:
Like you, I bought and just received an ONDA V701. Mine took 32 days (!) to arrive from China (bought from gadgetdealer.com... avoid like plague), and the box was beat to hell, but it seems to work fine ....with one exception.
That said, I like the tablet thus far, but a couple of things aren\'t flying right. One, it was advertised as having Adobe Flash ver. 11.1, but instead, mine came with 10.2. Yours? Not sure this matters, as Flash is going the way of the dodo-bird as far as Android goes.
My only real complaint thus far, and that despite trying everything I could find online, I cannot get NetFlix to work. This was/is one of the main reasons I bought it, as they advertised that it \"works with NetFlix\". I don\'t know whether it\'s the tablet, or the app that is the problem, but nonetheless, no love from NetFlix at this point.
I don\'t know if you are subscribed to Netflix, but if you are, I sure would like to know if it works for you on your V701, and if so, how did you get it going, and what settings are you\'re using to make it work? Appreciate hearing from you.
Best,
T. Bass
Applegate, Oregon

Thread: p1557 Post by davy2012-08-24 17:58:58 i kind of agree with you, and i\'m sure bale had the best intentions but the whole media circus at times is disturbing.
but if to had to pick on whether bale should have visited or not i\'d rather he visit for the sole reason that if he made any of the survivors feel good,even if it was only for the briefest moments, then it was worth it.
the victims medical and emotonals needs should be put first and if bale\'s visit helped any of them emotionally then i\'m glad